Slashdot Mirror
To the Moon and Beyond
isorox writes "The BBC is reporting that 'Europe is considering sending humans to the Moon, Mars and beyond within the next few decades', although the UK government 'does not support human space flight and will not fund UK citizens to go through the official European astronaut training programme'. However while plans are made for the next 30 years, Rosetta is due to launch in 2 weeks time, ready to rendevous and land on a comet in 2011. Assuming it doesn't blow up on launch."
thats what we need. More interest in getting mankind somewhere instead of trying to kill a man of another kind.
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> we should have been ready to set up a base on Mars already!
I know! I remember reading Sci-Fi [stories] about the Moon / Mars being colonized and thinking "WOW - What would it take to do that kind of terraforming?!" Its a shame that that noble goal [of living on other planets] gradually fall by the way side. Maybe in the next entury...
Speaking of terraforming, has anyone (scientists,etc) actually thought about how to [realistically/practically] terraform one of the planets, say Venus, Mars, or the Moon?
Cheers
Can someone from the UK answer this please? Is it the people or just the government that is so opposed to doing anything that involves the European Union?
Well, to many britons, the european parliment seems obscure and far away. People don't pay much attention in EU elections, often don't know who thier representatives in the european parliment are, etc. As such, people feel disconnected from the political process.
It is rare for people to hear about the european parliment making exciting, good, beneficial decisions; there are often stories about people being arrested for not using metric measures, and other buracratic rulings. Furthermore, quite often when important legal decisions are made by top courts, there is a european court that overturns the decision.
Reasons for going into Europe are typically complicated economic reasons, like no currency fluxuations helping buisness trading within europe, and suchlike. These issues are complicated and hard to understand. It is easy, on the other hand, to talk about how "there'll always be an england"; jingoistic flag-waving is easy, while teaching a population about economics is not.
So, to summarise, people feel independance stands for:
While people feel integration with europe stands for:
That's my take on it, anyway.
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
They weren't homeless when the USA was sending men to the moon, were they?